We spent the past week at The Hills Health Ranch at 100 Mile House, well, actually it’s at 108 but who’s counting!
This was a big holiday change for us…staying in a hotel setting and not in our tent…but we adjusted well enough. They didn’t have nearly the amount of snow as Cypress, but what their trails lacked in snow they more than made up for in excellent terrain. Was so nice to ski for extended periods of time not going up or down, just gliding along on flat and rolling trails. I did so much double poling on the 5 days we skied, well at least on 4 of the days…yesterday my skis didn’t seem to have the same glide or maybe my arms were too tired, I seemed to be doing much more diagonal striding which was still nice. We skied 3 times at The Hills and 3 times at 99 Mile Nordic Center. Both locations have excellent trails…there are so many trails at The Hills but not all of them had enough snow to be skied. I’ll want to explore more of the trails at a time when they have more snow. We were hoping to practice on the Cariboo Marathon route at 99 Mile’s trails, but the 20 km loop with he big hill was not tracked so we did the 10 km loop multiple times. We skied classic each day to take advantage of the nice trails in preparation for upcoming classic loppets, including the Cariboo Marathon in early February. And the trails had some sticks, branches, trees, rocks showing so I didn’t want to damage my slick skate skis…put some interesting markings in the bases of my classic skis…oh well, it was worth worth it!
Actually Katja had her first skate ski session yesterday, using my equipment. She did quite well…I suspect she’ll be getting skate ski gear in the near future.
The Hills is a very nice place, but rustic enough that we felt at home. We were spoiled to some excellent meals prepared by Chef Richard…he makes an awesome spinach salad and the pastry encrusted chicken with chutney was so tasty!
Being a ranch, they had many horses and 3 miniature donkeys. We enjoyed feeding them treats of carrots which they really appreciated. We’d like to visit again in the summer to go horseback riding…maybe we can combine it with a spring fishing trip since some of our favourite lakes are in the area.
For New Years they had a winter carnival, which meant they had a DJ blasting music over the ski hills, a couple campfires with hay-bales to sit around, hot drinks and hot dogs, a frozen pond for skating/hockey and a tube park. We enjoyed playing on the tube park…sliding down icy hills on fancy inner tubes, complete with a rope tow ride back to the top of the hill…it was really fun. At midnight there was an amazing fireworks show, a much bigger show than I expected.
We even got treated to a nice massage thanks to Xmas gifts from my parents…like I said, we really got spoiled.